(Lowell, MA) Every time a member of one’s family dies, the remaining members of the family must re-form to create a unit, or split away and cease to be. This is an especially arduous task for two almost estranged brothers in The Best Brothers. They must resolve what they were to each other when the matriarch of the family was alive, and what they are to each other now that she is gone. Continue reading →

(Lowell, MA) It’s one thing to create a play that mimics the feeling of being trapped in a conversation with someone who is batty; it’s another to make such a play entertaining. As the play 13 Things About Ed Carpolotti demonstrates, the difference is all in the storytelling prowess of the off-putting character. Continue reading →

(Lowell, MA) Which watershed moments in our lives define us, the ones where we rise above our fears or the ones where we give in to our basest nature? That’s the central question of the beautiful and flawed production of Dusk Rings a Bell, playing at the Merrimack Repertory Theatre. Continue reading →

(Lowell) The Reduced Shakespeare Company have long been proprietors of abridged histories and this touring production of The Complete History of Comedy (abridged) will deliver everything that you expect from the boys at the RSC: a three-man team dishing out biting satire, poignant historical and social commentary, and a dude in a really bad wig. Continue reading →

(Lowell) Why in the 21st century do we feel compelled to make all our special private moments so public, especially when it comes to marriage proposals? These days, a proposal is not Facebook official unless you enlist your family, Joe Biden, and the Michigan State marching band to take part in a carefully choreographed proposal that you can upload to YouTube. Continue reading →

(Lowell) Professional baseball player Ichiro Suzuki once got into hot water for saying that when his team is losing year after year he focuses instead on playing for his own individual accomplishments. To some, it showed selfishness, but to me it showed professionalism. Continue reading →

(Lowell) Nelson Mandela once said, “There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.” Yet many of us cling onto being small all our lives. Doing a play about that intentional smallness can be tricky without having the play succumb to smallness itself. Continue reading →

(Lowell) I didn’t know there had to be rules about flashback nostalgia stories, but I think I’ve found one….if only I can decide which one.

First, let’s define the genre. Have you ever seen the movie A Christmas Story or The Wonder Years? Then you know the kind of show MRT’s Mrs. Mannerly is attempting. It’s the adult narrator looking back on his precocious tween self, with a wistful smile, to share lessons learned. Continue reading →

(Lowell) We are usually mired in the mundane of everyday, and we can’t see movement in our own internal characters. That’s why we tend to want some movement in the characters we see on stage. In a good play, a protagonist cannot be the same in the end as she was in the beginning; she must at least gain some scars from experience. The rare exception is a script that goes for the meditative study of a character, as if peeling back layers of a soul like an onion. To pull this off, the author must have deep sympathy for both the character and the human condition, and it’s a narrower road to tread. Continue reading →

(Lowell) If you want to see inside the male workplace psyche, you must see the new Merrimack Repertory Theatre production of Glengarry Glen Ross, but I warn you: it’s not a pretty picture. It’s every man for himself and there is no mercy in David Mamet’s brutal examination of greed. Continue reading →

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/gēk/ n. A person of generally high intelligence capable of learning detailed information about how things work, why, and often how to make, fix, or improve them with a propensity for action in those regards...They gather in groups and have discussions over fictional worlds (and the possible sciences at work therein), the benefits of "open-source", or why ninjas are obviously better since they're fast and silent...those loud, drunk, stinky pirates would never know what hit them.... -Darvus Laan-http://geekdictionary. computing.net/define/geek /gēk/ n. informal. [usually with modifier] a knowledgeable and obsessive enthusiast: a computer geek -Oxford Dictionary Although an older definition refers to a carnival performer who eats the heads off live animals, no live animals were eaten at any time during the writing of the reviews on this site.